"All right, here's the deal." Nomi slips into one of the mess benches, facing the other three. "They tell me installation will be about ten days, starting this afternoon. They sent the detailed doc covering all the new equipment, and I've put it on the ship's net. It's thousands of screens, though, so here's the quick and dirty."
"We lose the main cargo bay. They'll keep it here, for a small fee, they have vacuum-tethers further up the main mast for stuff like that. I'll pay that out of ship's funds for now. After we get back, if we decide to, we can scrap it and recoup the expense, or we can pay it out of the before-shares profit from the expedition and hand back all the accelerator gear. The new stuff they're installing has no mortgage, after three full rounds in the deep dark on this contract, or about a decade, it's all ours, free and clear. Otherwise we either give it back or buy it outright. The new stuff has three main functions and a bunch of little ancillary modules to make it all hang together."
"One, the robotics bay. I'm sure you've all seen
Galileo's
creepy spiders. Well, get get a full set of our own, modded for micro- or zero-gee, a couple dozen to start, and the means to manufacture more of them once we latch on to a rock. The manufactory can make them out of a bunch of different common asteroidal metals, like iron or titanium.
Galileo
is also sending a large supply of the rare earths and less common metals needed to make their little electronic brains and various other bits, enough to make thousands of those things as long as we supply raw ore. The spiders are going to do all the actual mining, as well as as much of our EVA as possible. Radiation is almost a non-issue with our suits where we're going, but I don't want anyone unshielded any more than absolutely necessary."
"Josh, you'll be responsible for the bots and their infrastructure. Find out everything there is to know about running that manufactory in the next few days. The training technician will be here early next week, and I want you to have all of your questions ready for them."
"Yes, Skipper."
"Grubs says you seem technically competent, so I'm trusting you with this, but I hope I don't have to remind you that if something goes wrong with those spiders, not only do we risk the contract, we could die out there. Those things can carve up our hull just as easily as they carve rock. Faith."
The young astrogator perks up, "Yes, Captain?"
"Your responsibility is the mass accelerator. The only components that will be installed here are a separate helium-fusion core and the rail mounts. When we latch onto a large enough rock, we'll go into stasis while the bots start mining and smelting materials, and their first construction project will be to create the rails for the accelerator. They have to be a couple of kilometers long for our purposes, giving a launched slug enough time to get up to speed as it traverses them. We have to be able to manage the tumble on whatever rock we pick, so it's going to be small enough that the rails will probably circle it, but not so small that making them uses up so much of it that it's not worth mining the rest of the rock. It's probably going to be three months after we arrive before we'll be ready to start shipping iron from our first target."
"The good news is the rails stay with the rock, so if we find a really big target that doesn't have too much tumble, we can use them again when we return and shave a few months off of the quota for our next trip. Best case we find a
really
big one that's already tide-locked to the sun. Any questions?"
"Not yet, Captain."
"Good girl. Last is the autosmelter. Grubs?"
The gruff engines man stirs, and replies, "Yah I worked with 'em before. I'll give it a once over and put a couple tons of gravel through it before we leave."
"Good enough. We'll have ample reducing agents for all the useful metals we're likely to encounter out there, but the slugs themselves are going to be raw ore. The settlement can use the smelting byproducts themselves."
"Got it. The inspector show up for the stasis rigs yet?"
"Yup, early this morning, I almost missed him. All checked out and topped up, we have enough scaffolding to handle several dozen activations each."
"What's scaffolding? I mean, in this sense?" Faith asks.
"Have you ever been in stasis?"
"No, Captain."
"I have." adds Josh
"Okay, best we deal with this now so your first experience isn't when we leave. Josh, Grubs, you're dismissed to begin your shifts. And you," Nomi beckons Faith as she exits the room, "come with me."
----
No ship Grubs is on ever has
rust
, but the hatch that Nomi leads Faith through, just forward of where dock technicians were removing the cargo bay, definitely has a sort of air of underutilization.
"Welcome to the mausoleum. We don't use stasis much, since till now the
Rockhopper
has stayed primarily inside the asteroid belt, and the longest trip we take generally doesn't pass three weeks, depending on orbits at the time."
Nomi stops in front of a wall that reminds faith of nothing so much as a morgue, covered in hatches with tiny viewports and ancient-looking electronics. Sure enough, the captain punches a few commands on a dim readout and hauls backwards on one of the hatches, which grudgingly begins to slide out of the wall, revealing something like a hospital bed.
Nomi smooths the mattress for a moment and fiddles with various small devices that lay on it haphazardly, connected to the drawer by clear tubing. Apparently satisfied, she clears the center of the narrow drawer and says, "Okay, strip to your skivvies and hop in."
Faith looks askance at the darkness deeper in the wall. "Um..."
Nomi sighs. "Kid, look, we can't carry enough in the pantry to handle a three month one-way trip for four
and
feed ourselves during the mining phase unless we live off of vat paste, which is not my ambition in life. Get in, I'm going to hook you up and put you under while I explain the process to you. This is so that I know, and, more importantly,
you
know that you won't lose your shit when we have to do it for real."
"Yes, Captain." Steeling herself, she shucks her uniform and climbs into what is hard to think of as anything but a coffin.
"That's right, no, head at this end, yeah, now lie flat. Okay, left arm up, here, kick off your boots, right. Okay... all right."